EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to us at: . If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: .
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The Spanish Catholic Church has always been afraid of numbers in the pedophile scandal. In the historic agreement signed with the Ombudsman to compensate the victims, . Perhaps because the Church itself has used them secretly and when they came to light they have been a scandal: as this newspaper revealed in 2021, 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000, depending on the severity of the case. Pope Francis himself.
In the midst of chaos, negligence and the priority of covering everything up, each bishop or religious superior has done what he wanted with the meager compensation paid in recent years. This has meant that each time a specific case of compensation became known, other victims discovered that they had been paid much less. That is why it is important to unify criteria, and although it has not been established in writing, it is what will end up happening in practice, or it will be a source of new problems.
Numbers have been the enemy of the Church in this matter from the beginning. In September 2018, he wrote to the 70 Spanish dioceses to find out how many cases they were aware of. Only 18 responded, and most of them said they didn’t know anything. In that first balance it turned out that only 34 cases officially existed, taken from news and sentences. Luis Argüello, who this Monday signed the agreement as president of the Episcopal Conference (CEE), is the same one who in 2021 said that in Spain there were only “zero or very few cases.”
In this history the Church has always remained silent or lied, waiting for the storm to pass or THE COUNTRY to get tired. She has only acted forced, by the media, by social pressure or by the Pope, as on this occasion, since Leo XIV wants to arrive in Spain in June with this resolved. The CEE said that it did not have data because it could not ask each diocese about its cases and ended up doing so; He stated that he did not know figures, and then gave them; He assured that he would never commission an internal audit, and one day he had to ask for it; He warned that he did not plan to pay compensation and will end up doing so. That is why it is necessary to continue demanding answers in what is still pending to clarify the entire truth, which is a lot.
From the beginning it was clear that, if there were no numbers on the phenomenon, it was as if it did not exist. That is why this diary with all the known cases, updated to this day and which continues to be the only one in existence: then it had 306 accused and 816 victims; At this moment there are 1,571 accused and 2,951 victims. It represents 1.3% of the male clergy between 1940 and 2021.
The EEC has made real botches with the figures. Even today it is not clear the number of cases it recognizes, because after undertaking a transparency simulation, . In 2022, he commissioned an audit of a law firm, which he ended up denying. He tried to replace it with his own, which ironically was called to give light and it was the opposite. It was a disaster, a copy and paste of data, where they were even classified as credible or not credible with unknown criteria, always seeking to reduce the figures (and the money to be paid later) to a minimum.
For all this, it is understandable in 2023, commissioned a year earlier by Congress due to the impact of this newspaper’s investigation. He finally framed the scope of the scandal: in a survey of 8,000 people, a very high sample in an impeccable study, . That was equivalent to about 440,000 people, and with the expected margin of error, it was between 350,000 and 530,000, according to media estimates. The then president of the bishops, Juan José Omella, accused them of making an “intentional and erroneous extrapolation.”
In its flight from the truth and the search for maximum abstraction, the EEC began to say that the numbers were not important, but the people. He has used that alibi until today: Argüello has insisted that they are interested in going “face to face.” There is a lot of face in this statement, coming from an institution that has slammed the door in the faces of the victims who came to it for decades. But this desire to know faces is commendable if it really translates into analyzing case by case and with rigor what has happened and, beyond the aggressor, who was responsible for covering him up, for doing nothing, for transferring him or even for helping him flee from justice and sending him to South America. Because all this is still pending, absolutely nothing has been done.
The victims hope that the Church also sees those faces well. In fact, some have already been seen for five years in this newspaper’s database, which contains a list of more than 60 bishops and religious superiors accused of silencing or covering up cases of abuse. But there has never been any response from the Church, neither in Spain nor in the Vatican. This newspaper has also referred to the EEC and the Holy See, without response.
Acknowledging harm is all well and good, but what exactly is the harm? The truth also involves clearly establishing, in each order and in each diocese, the known cases, as the Church in the United States has done, with initiatives that here seem like something from extraterrestrials: there are lists with the name of the aggressor, the place of the abuse and the date. There are also thousands of documents available on the internet. That transparency is still light years away from the Spanish Church, which is still focused on hiding the information it has. And he still hopes not to have to reveal it if he resolves it by paying compensation, but that is only part of the truth, since most of the victims have died.
This Monday’s step represents the arrival point of something unthinkable seven and a half years ago: that the Church compensates the victims with the control of the State, because it has already been seen that it is not trustworthy. The Church continues not to tell the truth about what it knows, without opening its archives to an independent audit and without those responsible for covering up the abuses having paid for it. There are still many steps to take.
